How would you like to design a bitcoin banknote?

[franky1]

ill say it again.. has anyone actually found a useful reason to use bank notes for trading in real world.

knowing the security risks of the first person knowing the privkey before handing it over risks losses to the recipient.

on the other hand. bonds for inheritance/gifts to trusted friends/family would be a great thing.

[1714582765]

1714582765

[1714582765]

1714582765

[1714582765]

1714582765

[1714582765]

1714582765

[casascius]

ill say it again.. has anyone actually found a useful reason to use bank notes for trading in real world.

knowing the security risks of the first person knowing the privkey before handing it over risks losses to the recipient.

on the other hand. bonds for inheritance/gifts to trusted friends/family would be a great thing.

I give bitcoins out as small bonuses at the office to the team I manage. They are appreciated as bills just as much as coins. Since my typical gift is 0.5 BTC this is much easier than a coin, and they feel more welcome to spend it since they are not destroying something.

[franky1]

employee bonus, ok i see the benefit, instead of having to ask them for addresses, u just hand them a envelope with a nice surprise inside without them knowing they were going to get something first.

more trusting transactions like business to individual has its positives as a gift voucher type thing, but what about the other way round.

imagine a domino's pizza accepting bitcoin. what would stop strangers from handing over a note, but having the privkey set that as soon as they hand over the note, they dont just empty it before domino's gets to do it. or the domino's pizza employee emptying it then saying sorry boss the customer must have emptied it the second they handed it to us.

im definetly liking the gift voucher/bond idea though. (use once)

just thinking about the normal 'bank note' trading and passing many hands while being in circulation..
maybe the OP shouldnt call them bank notes. but bitcoin vouchers for small denominations.. and bonds for larger denominations..

as bank notes are suppose to be handed around and stay in curculation and be guaranteed its value by a central party . EG a bank holding all the priv keys and a bank note just having the public keys to verify value.

[casascius]

imagine a domino's pizza accepting bitcoin. what would stop strangers from handing over a note, but having the privkey set that as soon as they hand over the note, they dont just empty it before domino's gets to do it. or the domino's pizza employee emptying it then saying sorry boss the customer must have emptied it the second they handed it to us.

In a consumer-to-business scenario, the business scans the note with a handheld barcode scanner attached to the POS system, which sweeps the funds immediately.  The note is then thrown away.

The employee emptying the funds is no more likely than an employee accepting a $20 bill, putting it in the register, and then pretending it was a $10.  Both cases the customer would create a scene and the employee wouldn't get away with a habit of it for very long.  And ideally the POS is going to have a high-end barcode gun, so it would look out of the ordinary for an employee to be using his personal smartphone to be scanning banknotes.

[legolouman]

payments for genius art can be directed to: 1RXWrxw3JBVv4AKy9UGSrXnQefwzWJUmM

This is genius. I'll buy 420,000 of them.

[franky1]

imagine a domino's pizza accepting bitcoin. what would stop strangers from handing over a note, but having the privkey set that as soon as they hand over the note, they dont just empty it before domino's gets to do it. or the domino's pizza employee emptying it then saying sorry boss the customer must have emptied it the second they handed it to us.

In a consumer-to-business scenario, the business scans the note with a handheld barcode scanner attached to the POS system, which sweeps the funds immediately.  The note is then thrown away.

The employee emptying the funds is no more likely than an employee accepting a $20 bill, putting it in the register, and then pretending it was a $10.  Both cases the customer would create a scene and the employee wouldn't get away with a habit of it for very long.  And ideally the POS is going to have a high-end barcode gun, so it would look out of the ordinary for an employee to be using his personal smartphone to be scanning banknotes.

understandable in that situation.. but thats more like a gift voucher situation of a one use note..

where as bank notes left in circulation would just be placed in the register and handed out to other customers or given out as wages. basically a non-single use note.. so is this idea / topic of thread technically a gift certificate/voucher/coupon.. a one use only thing.. or a bank note in the traditional sense of left in circulation..

again i dont feel this should be technically called a bank note. as its flawed for use in circulation.. but a bitcoin coupon/voucher/gift certificate for small denominations and a bond for large denominations. sounds a bit more accurate to the idea and use of the idea envisioned through this thread.

do i have this correct?

[pointbiz]

v1.7 has been released with the artistic wallet:
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.7-SHA1-46215e8a2f026b784f29ea86c00c866e634a22fa.html

Great job. I have some suggestions.

I think that the psy artwork appeals most to the folks not in the US. It's so radically different than the dead presidents we're used to. I like your site because the work is done on the client and not the server. That said, trust is hard to obtain when using websites. Running this locally makes some people feel safer. This is why I'm using RobKohr's print.printcoin.com project and I recommend it to other people. The problem is, the people who I have told about print.printcoins.com have a hard time getting it to run on a windows machine which is what most people use.

Do you have plans to add other note designs? Is your project on github? I could help add more notes.

I still wish all the participants had provided layered image files. All of the designs will appeal to someone. To those that entered the contest, if you can give me a layered PSD or gimp XCF (preferred) I will add the note to the print.printcoins.com project by RobKohr and perhaps we'll see it on the bitaddress site also.

I am also interested in the "bond style" design where it takes up a whole page and resembles a stock certificate.

Github
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

You can save the HTML and run it offline much easier than running a PHP web server.

I am still adjusting the size of the art work. When that is done you could make a fork with different art work. It would just involve changing the embedded PNG and some CSS tweeks.

It is challenging to offer lots of art with the all-in-one file without bloating the file size.

[casascius]

I think the term voucher is probably more correct, but am still glad I asked for a "banknote" design.

Calling it a single use voucher would probably make it more clear as to how it works.

[adamstgBit]

Working draft for v1.7:
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.7-SHA1-.html
- Using the SVG with the small dimensions from Psy's downloads (795px wide).
- At this moment you need Ubuntu fonts installed on your system for it to look proper. Meaning it's not using WebFonts.
- Check the "Art?" checkbox on the Paper Wallet tab to see the SVG art wallet. It is a 4MB SVG external download via iframe.
- Please note this is unsigned work and SVGs are capable of including JavaScript!


I feel the public and private QR codes should be the same ratio... so at this moment the white boxes are not the correct size. Also, there is a CSS oddity where Chrome is rending the private QR Code a few pixels more to left than Firefox or IE9....

+1

this is perfect, thank you

[Raoul Duke]

Here is the Note Design 100% vector format.
http://clinicadosom.com/downloads/Bitcoin-note-with-text-small-plain-svg-final-inkscape.svg_.zip

Open with Inkscape for best result(layers, opacity, etc.)

[franky1]

Here is the Note Design 100% vector format.
http://clinicadosom.com/downloads/Bitcoin-note-with-text-small-plain-svg-final-inkscape.svg_.zip

Open with Inkscape for best result(layers, opacity, etc.)

very good design. nice you left out the example QR codes but still has the example address and priv key.

on a separate subject i have a vb.net program with a webcam reference in it and a evaluation qr code reader dll reference in it. anyone know of a great .net dll reference thats not a evaluation for me to perfect my qr code reader?

im asking here because this thread is full of experienced geniuses who may already know what im on about.

i want it to test out these sexy bank notes... oops vouchers im printing out lol

[pointbiz]

https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v1.8-SHA1-97d52a44eeb261e2398e98e1eed2bd56b99c845a.html

The banknote has been resized to fit into a physical wallet. Now prints 3 per page.

[ErebusBat]

Love it!

[casascius]

I'm pleased to be able to present the following that I've done some work on.

I have pretty much copied the design but re-rendered everything myself, from scratch, in SVG format.  That is - natively - without converting a raster image.  As a result, the whole thing as SVG weighs in at under 250 KB.  I did this in Adobe Illustrator.



.ai, .png, .svg -> https://casascius.com/graphnote.zip

[knight22]

Very nice!

[casascius]

I updated my utility to print this note in five colors (yellow, blue, purple, green, and greyscale).  Updated source is included.

https://casascius.com/btcaddress.zip

I also changed it to use .NET Framework 4 instead of 3.5.  If that causes problems for anyone please let me know.

I also changed it so you could choose 1, 2, or 3 notes per page.  My imagined use case for a 1-note page would be to print a flyer for your family and friends explaining "now you have a bitcoin address - just cut this out and stick it in your wallet" sort of like the DontTreadOnMeme idea.  (The artwork is replaceable since it's just PNG's in the folder, so this generator could be used to produce DontTreadOnMeme flyers).  You would just run the paper through the printer a 2nd time to print the flyer content from the program of your choice.

I changed the size so it matches the size output by Bitaddress.org, at least on my printer.  (my previous size was a wee bit too big for many fiat wallets, particularly ones meant for Federal Reserve's notes)

[franky1]

great stuff, especially the sourcecode. thanks muchly

[thechevalier]

This is truly awesome.

But... what about the other side of the bill? I mean, it's going to look a bit lame if it's all super high design on the front and it's just white paper on the reverse.

[casascius]

This is truly awesome.

But... what about the other side of the bill? I mean, it's going to look a bit lame if it's all super high design on the front and it's just white paper on the reverse.

Hypothetically, would you be more interested in a roll of toilet paper with decorations on both sides than one without?  In a way, I still want these bills to be like toilet paper - thrown away after a single use.  If we make them too pretty, people won't want to throw them away!  Totally kidding. I asked for a single side design because my expectation was that people should be able to print these quick-and-dirty as though it's a form of "cash" and printing it were more convenient than taking a trip to an ATM, which is less convenient if you have to flip over a page and print both sides.  I have published the vector art within that SVG HTML file, so it should be quite trivial to take my front side and make a matching style backside if someone's interested in doing that.

[thechevalier]

Well, I would be. Doesn't sound all that trivial though.

I think maybe some of those fractal patterns printed whole page might be nice.  Just print the fractal stuff across one side of a whole sheet, flip it and print the banknote faces and cut. No need to worry about the registration and it would look nicer than blank paper. Just an idea.